Seth Besmertnik

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Seth Besmertnik guides corporate strategy and develops strategic partnerships for Conductor, and his vision and thought leadership have established the company as a recognized authority in natural search. Since co-founding the company in 2005, Besmertnik has navigated the company through multiple finance rounds and extraordinary growth. Today the company boasts a customer list of more than one hundred Fortune 500 and Internet Retailer 500 companies and hundreds of the world

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Seth Besmertnik

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SethBesmertnik

Favorite Thing About SEO

Ways Large Companies Can Scale and Automate

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twitter: @besmertnik

Blog Comments & Posts

Hey Ben - great post and thanks for the mention. At Conductor, we have believed (and preached) for years that SEO metrics, most notably ranking, are only "milestones" and the real measure of success is your business data - traffic, conversion events and revenue. We absolutely believe that rankings are important (if you do not rank, it's hard to get any clicks), yet modern day SEO is managed with your business data (analytics info) as much as your seo data (rankings, etc). I wrote a post on this earlier in the year.

At Conductor, our platform integrates closely with Google Analytics, Omniture or whatever web analytics platform you use. We use this data to create the ultimate SEO channel funnel analysis....seo factors > rankings > traffic > conversion/revenue. In fact, a lot of our customers today are now starting SEO programs with analytics data vs their seo keyword lists. For example, mining your referring keywords from your analytics (both paid and natural) is an incredible source for keywords to focus on organically. You likely have keywords that rank on page 2, yet have managed to drive some conversions...bringing those to page one is a great strategy - in fact, some big agencies provide that as the foundation to their SEO programs. This is just one way people use our product, and more importantly, is the modern way of managing your seo program - with your business data.

I'm looking forward to reading other comments, and seeing what folks are doing when they combine their business data with seo data.

Hey Sam - great post and thanks for including a screen shot of Conductor Searchlight. I wanted to make a comment as it relates to the value of SEO Platforms...if you are purchasing it just for reporting and you are not a very large multi-unit enterprise, you are right - it can be an expensive cost to provide reports. Although I would argue that the ability to understand investment return is a key tenant to why paid search has so much scale (the 2nd being it really works), and that if reporting can give your company a greater sense of your returns, and transparency into new investment - it might be worth the cost to enable SEO growth. However, speaking for our platform, we go way beyond reporting to deliver value to our customers. An SEO platform can enable you to grow your top-line SEO through continuous keyword discovery & management, detailed recommendations on which templates and sites to optimize, and how - to drive the best results with the least amount of effort....workflow to streamline making site changes and understand the impact...and also enables you to build out link building efforts with greater insight and recommendations on your link profile, competitor's link profile and top domains to pursue (as an example). I can go on for quite a bit, but just making the point that a great SEO Platform is more then just reporting - its an evolved way for in-house SEO teams to expand the top of their SEO funnel & drive greater results through the middle - while bringing reporting to a new level.

You can download a whitepaper on http://www.seoplatform.com on what an SEO platform can do for your business (Conductor owned website in full disclosure).

Awesome post. Conductor is super excited to partner with the Moz team and by the incredible power of the Linkscape data. Our enterprise customers really love the integration and we're looking forward to watching the APIs evolve in the coming years.

As for the tie comment, it's partially the startup guy in me and partially the neck expansion I've realized as an outcome of being a "startup guy"...I was going to drop the suit...but since we had 125+ brands come to the launch event, I figured we needed to "look professional".

It's great to see this and it was a great privledge to speak at this event, which in my opinon, was one of the best SEO events of the year. I have already got a few e-mails from folks who have printed up big market opportunity posters in their office - and started influencing key executives for SEO initiatives- it really works! The download page is still up if anyone wants access to the free tools and information we put together: http://www.conductor.com/seomoz - looking forward to Pro Seminar 2010!

We're certainly not recommending that - anyone - purchase links in lieu doing other forms of SEO. Paid linking should be a tactic only imparted after you've achieved a critical mass of natural links, built a well SEO structured site and architecure, and only need a few links to drive focus & structure to your deep pages that have difficulty being linked to naturally.

But as I stated before - they can be appropriate and often are needed by the worlds best brands. As far as opportunity costs - they should always be a 'last mile' activity, and like all search expenditures including SEO, should be monitored for ongoing ROI. Some things we do are provide clients with trend and stewardship reports - complete with control group rankings so you can isolate your other SEO efforts - this way marketers can track and understand continued value over time.

Vanessa – you bring up a good point, and one we think deserves a larger conversation. To us, the question shouldn’t be about do I use a paid link or a ‘link building service or consultant’ (who, btw, often charges much, much more making that a REALLY EXPENSIVE ‘paid link’). We believe that the question should be about whether or not the tactic, be it links or on-page SEO, is in the best interests of the searcher – or if it is being used to game the engines.

We attended (and happened to sponsor the food and drinks for) the last NY SEMPO meetup. During one session, there was in an house ‘expert‘ detailing his SEO best practices. His two examples?

1) 1)To get a client affiliate site for ranked for ‘elective cosmetic surgery’ ahead of the industry physician site that was currently number one, and

2) 2)Another lead-gen site to rank for ‘free credit report’ ahead of the government, the three majors credit agencies, and the actual site where you can get your free credit report.

These kind customers wouldn’t last a tenth of a second for our internal quality guidelines and process, and here we were, in the midst of 130 of NY’s best SEO minds and thought leaders, and no one said a word! He then moved on to discussing the viability of spamming various social sites, and which ones were cracking down on SEO Spammers - the ironic part was - this guy said paid links were a risky strategy and he did not use them - but there he is pushing lead gen sites ahead of the American Sociery of Plastic Surgeons.

Search Spammers (we call them the ‘underwear marketers' of affiliates and aggregators) gave paid links a bad name – but there certainly are legitimate uses for legitimate marketers. We have seen marketers with millions of links directed at their home page but they’re still failing to rank for their fundamental business terms – not because of bad SEO, but because their ‘natural’ linking strategy has failed them – and their specific category pages fail to get the links that their home pages do. This is especially the case for the big brick and mortar stores & large enterprise companies that have a very diverse set of products and categories, and find it difficult to ‘focus’ anything. Their paid link ratio is 1 to 1,000,000 – they’re not ‘gaming’ anything - just trying to drive some structure to their site.

My mini-diatribe (apologies for the length) isn’t aimed at you, Vanessa – I think you are amazing and wish there were more people who followed your thought leadership.

It’s the goal, and the user experience that should matter – we think that’s a topic that has not been discussed for far too long. I am passionate about search quality and anti-spam efforts as much as anyone, and believe SEO can make play a major role in making Search and the Internet a better place.

Rebecca - great post and metaphor. However, your post assumes that a paid link is a paid link - and there is nothing else to be considered. I'd hate for someone who is just learning the ropes about SEO to think that anytime you are engaging in paying for a link (albeit directly or indirectly), that you are destined for a flat tire. There are a myriad of different factors that go into the sustainability of a paid link - from relevance to quality - however what is most often overlooked is the stage at which your website is. For example, if 5% of your backlinks are paid - you have a problem – as your authority is being manufactured (never buy links as way to drive authority).

But if you are an established brand/website, competing against lots of highly optimized content sites (cnet, wikipedia, etc), and a slew of “underwear marketers” (lead gen, aggregators, affiliates, MFA sites, etc) – then you may be at a big disadvantage based on natural linking patterns. It is very common for your site to have a great deal of domain authority (lots of links to the homepage) but very little link focus for your internal pages; and in this scenario, there is nothing wrong with paying for a few links from relevant sites to help drive some structure to your internal pages – it’s almost like changing a title tag. This is actually a good thing for the Internet as an environment and many of the best brands in the world employ these kinds of strategies.

I would love for SEOMOZ to address these kinds of considerations when making broad statements about paid linking tactics. You guys are the best.

We are all overlooking some key points in this discussion, imo. Why is Google so determined to find your "inventory" and devalue it? Why have we created an environment that needs to be kept a secret? Perhaps because if you let any advertiser under the sun by a link on almost any site, then that poses a real threat to Google's results?
As an industry, "text link broker" companies need to think of the search engines as partners. You need to ask yourself before every link is placed - will this be good for Google? Does this site deserve to rank well for this term? For starters, affiliates should not be allowed to buy links. No one would use Google if they did a search for a term and the top 10 companies were spammy affiliate companies that redirected to some "larger" site.
Secondly, pay attention to relevance. If links are not relevant then they should not be approved. This is not about making a quick buck, or getting a quick boost in Google, its about creating a sustainable marketing strategy (and business) that can co-exist with Google (and maybe even help them).
Yes, this is altruistic (and maybe a bit naïve), but if we follow this notion of quality & relevance & integrity & ethics & what’s good for Google and their users – then maybe there wont be this cat and mouse game that the industry is bound to lose in.

Going direct can be a great strategy. However, we've seen that most high quality sites are not interested in working directly with individual advertisers for a few hundred dollars a month. You can certainly gain some traction this way with "mom and pop" type sites, but quality makes all the difference with buying links.